It is known to make caskets for the final disposal of human remains by scoring and cutting a flat blank of corrugated fiberboard and then folding it up to form a casket body for receiving the corpse. Such caskets and methods for making them are disclosed, for example, in U.S Pat. No. 4,967,445, issued Nov. 6, 1990 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,773,134, issued Sep. 27, 1988. The casket body is preferably covered interiorly with a liquid-impervious liner, and its exterior provided with a decorative covering.
Such caskets require substantial finishing work after the precursor blank has been folded up into casket form, to install the interior lining and the exterior covering. This constitutes a substantial and commercially important drawback, especially in certain situations. For example, it is often desirable to be able to ship the flat precursor blank to a remote point of use, which may be in a foreign country, where unskilled persons can take the blank and convert it into a completed casket body. According to the prior art, one must either ship and store the casket in final assembled form, which because of its substantial volume is very costly and inconvenient, or provide skilled workmen at the point of use to apply the liner and decorative covering, which is also expensive and inconvenient.
A principal object of the present invention is to provide a casket, casket precursor and method for converting the precursor into a casket, which permit shipment and storage of the precursor as a flat blank, and permit easy, quick conversion of the precursor blank into a casket body with liner and exterior covering, without requiring skilled labor or expensive tools.